Housing System and Urbanization in the People’s Republic of China

This chapter provides a contextualized interpretation of the transformation of housing regimes in urban China since the abolition of the urban welfare housing system in 1998. Particular attention is given to the impacts of public housing provision on China’s urbanization mode. The employment of the widely used state-market-family model is supplemented by contextualization. A close examination of the case of Public Rental Housing (PRH) in Shanghai helps to show that the recent revival of public housing in Chinese cities is mostly driven by economic growth motives. Despite that the Chinese urban housing regime up to now could be located within the context of other Asian countries’ ‘productivist’ welfare regimes, this chapter however discerns mixed evidence that it is recently shifting towards a ‘developmentalist’ regime. This investigation offers multifaceted insights on the complexity of the social-economic dynamics in post-reform urban China.